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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.

"President-elect Donald Trump is keeping America in the dark about his earliest conversations and decisions about his incoming government, and bucking a long-standing practice intended to ensure the public has a watchful eye on the nation's new leader."

"Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the presidential election on Tuesday helped usher in a new era of Republican rule in Washington. But voters also weighed in on several science-related state ballot items. Here’s a roundup of the results:" Measures include a California cigarette tax, a Montana measure funding biomedical research, and an Oregon measure against wildlife trafficking.

"On April 17, 2013, an explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer Company plant in West, Texas, killed 15 people and injured hundreds. It also destroyed more than 150 buildings around the plant. Among these were the West Intermediate School for 4th and 5th graders, located about 550 feet (170 meters) away from the fertilizer plant, and West High School, about 1,150 feet (350 meters) away."

"A federal judge ruled Thursday the state of Michigan and Flint have to provide home-delivered bottled water to residents if they can’t prove faucet filters are working to remove harmful lead from the drinking water."

"Leaders of West Virginia’s coal industry were rejoicing Wednesday over the election of Republican Donald Trump as the nation’s 45th president — and the possible regulatory rollbacks that may come with it — but industry and economic experts remained skeptical that Trump can really bring back a significant number of mining jobs lost largely to competition with low-priced natural gas."

"Protests. Hunger strikes. Sit-ins that disrupt construction. At the immense Muskrat Falls hydroelectric dam project in a remote and rugged part of Labrador, the indigenous people who live nearby have been raising louder and louder alarms. But it is not about the dam itself. The controversy is over what will flow from it."

"In recent years, a number of communities in the state have passed local [fracking] bans, but the state Supreme Court struck them down. Activists then decided to try to change the constitution to allow local fracking bans. So the oil and gas industry then decided to try to make changing the constitution more difficult."

"President-elect Donald Trump does not have the traditional cadre of Washington insiders and donors to build out his Cabinet, but his transition team has spent the past several months quietly building a short list of industry titans and conservative activists who could comprise one of the more eclectic and controversial presidential Cabinets in modern history."

"The Canadian company behind the Keystone XL oil pipeline said Wednesday that it will work with President-elect Donald Trump on reviving the Canada-to-U.S. project, which outgoing President Barack Obama rejected one year ago this week."

"Donald Trump's surprising electoral win is likely to dominate the headlines for weeks. But, across the nation there were a variety of less-well-publicized votes on issues related to food and agriculture. Here are a few of those results."